Eyes Wide Open

The look of determination and passion that is etched into my meh’s (mother’s) face while speaking about organic agriculture is one that I have become used to after spending nearly a week living and having exchanges with organic farmers in Yasothorn and Kalasin. My meh’s father was diagnosed with stomach cancer twenty years ago as a direct result of growing tobacco and using an excessive amount of herbicides and pesticides. While giving farmers subsidies for using chemical fertilizers, neither the government nor the fertilizer companies educated the farmers on the health risks involved when using such toxic substances. My da (grandfather) did not realize that applying such large quantities of herbicides and pesticides onto his fields posed any risk to him, his family, or his neighbors; he simply wanted to ensure that he had a high-yielding season. Sadly, this is not an isolated occurrence. Many innocent and oblivious farmers have suffered serious consequences from using chemical fertilizers, and many of them have decided to switch to organic farming instead of wallowing in despair and resentment.

I came to this program with my eyes wide open and unblinking. After spending 4 months in Thailand, and I want to leave this country having gained a new perspective on the world and its people. So far, I have successfully managed to witness many aspects of human nature that reinforces that people are beautiful, strong, and compassionate beings in a way that I have never seen before. I have met sugarcane and cassava farmers indebted to a sugarcane company that came into their village in 1994 and cut all of the forest surrounding the village down to make room for sugar fields, so as to force all of the farmers in that village to work for the company and become sugarcane farmers. This same company pays the farmers ten baht, roughly thirty cents, for ten sugarcanes, which does not sufficiently cover the costs and manual labor that it takes to grow ten sugarcanes. The farmers we met with are slowly switching to organic agriculture, but it is especially difficult for them because they are trying to get out of debt, which means that the first year after switching to organic farming in which a farmer’s yield decreases causes them severe setbacks in trying to pay off their debts.

I also met many villagers, including my homestay family in Yasothorn, who are proud to spread awareness to other villagers about the benefits of organic farming: more nutrient-enriched soil, more animals on their fields, a diverse variety of crops, and less expensive since one does not need to factor in the cost of chemical fertilizers, through the Green Market that they created one year ago. The Green Market is composed of roughly thirty stalls that sell only organic produce and organically fed meat. Their primary motive is not to make a profit, but to encourage others to lead healthier lives by eating organically, and to encourage others to switch to organic farming as well. The villagers I was lucky enough to meet with had a huge impact on me because they have dedicated their lives to a cause, even when faced with the obstacle of fighting against a government that constantly implements policies that are in direct opposition to the goals of the villagers.

After only a month here, I can honestly say that I have already acquired a new outlook on people. I have never experienced or witnessed much suffering throughout all twenty years of my life, which are both privileges and disadvantages. While I am lucky to have never suffered much, I have been sheltered from the struggles and pain that most of the world’s population endures on a daily basis. Since being in Thailand, the capacity of the human spirit and heart has amazed me. I was immediately struck by a feeling of awe while watching people who have been knowingly hurt and oppressed by their own government come together to actively fight against the injustices that face them in a struggle to preserve their culture.

Katherine Steinhardt
Goucher College

"A Pot of Food is a Pot of Medicine"

Khun Kriang, an herbal medicine doctor at the Herbal Medicine Center in Yasothorn province said, “A pot of food is a pot of medicine.” This thought traced me back to my connections with food and the role it plays in my life. Back in Boston, I prided myself in using my reusable bags at Whole Foods to purchase as much Organic or All Natural food as possible without burning a hole in my wallet. But why was I really purchasing Organic Food in the first place? My answer, at the time, would be- because it’s healthier. So if I had to choose between two apples that looked the exact same, but one was labeled “certified organic”- I bought it no matter the price. I never thought about where that apple had come from or why it was organic. I never wondered why I was going to eat the apple, or whom I could share it with.

After my experiences in Yasothorn living on an organic farm and participating in a Green Market, I realize that there’s more to food than just what you eat- food is a story; it’s a process; it’s a part of our lives. There are more times than I can count in my life where convenience and inexpensive “deals” overcame my desire to put thought into the food I was eating. But the feeling I had after a bowl of Ramen noodles as opposed to the feeling I have after I invite my friend over to eat the Filipino dish my Grandmother passed on to me cannot be compared. Food is more than just nourishment; it’s an experience, relationship and culture.

This all ties back to the concept of food as a medicine. Medicine heals you when you’re sick and prevents you from future problems. Food is similar in that way- it’s a method of sustaining one’s life through not only nutrition but relationships. Food is a culture and a means of bringing humans together. It’s a reason to gather together with people you love, it’s a tradition that can be passed throughout your families while also a livelihood for farmers and producers.

I worry in America we have lost this connection with food. Instead of having a food culture as a country, I find many Americans have to reach back into their own personal roots to find their food identities. But some have lost that connection to their roots, as it has been overcome by the convenience of fast food or the inexpensive processed goods. In Thailand, the price of organic food is the same as food grown with chemicals. The same people who can afford non-organic food can afford organic. But in America, we not only are slowly losing our food culture that is made up of the melting pot of different food ethnicities- but we are losing the equality of our society, all having the equal opportunity to eat what’s healthy and sustainable.

However, there is a slight glimpse of hope. The organic movement in America is slowly growing and making the demand of organic food more prevalent- thus making it much more available to all consumers. Also, I have always found that whenever I share my food identity with others- whether that’s inviting them over for a traditional Passover dinner or cooking up one of my Grandmother’s Filipino recipes- it sparks something in other people, wanting to share their food identity with me. I think we need to embrace the food that defines us, but not forget where it comes from and the hands that make or grow it. Food is not just breakfast, lunch and dinner. It sustains our lives for however long we live. Food heals in a way modern medicine cannot. It connects us with other humans, bringing us together to enjoy life.

So where do we go from here?

Rani Pimentel
Northeastern University

A Sack of Rice

Last September, my housemate came home from the superstore Costco with a sack of rice. We were all excited to have this seemingly endless supply—of jasmine, no less—for a cheap price. For the next four months, the rice sat prominently on the kitchen floor and was measured into puddings, curries and stirfrys for ten ravenous people. Looking back, I realize there is no way it was not Jasmine 105, the hybrid form of rice that has taken over much of Thailand’s farmland.

The Green Revolution of the 1960’s brought chemical agriculture to Thailand. The government encouraged the transformation from integrated, diverse farming to monocropping. These techniques were paired with Jasmine 105, easy to grow and in high demand by the market. Today, 95% of farmers in Surin Province use chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Rice, Thailand’s nutritional and cultural staple, has dwindled in diversity, the number of varieties shrinking by 45%.

Buying the sack of rice was our way of being self-sufficient. Living in a house without my parents for the first time last year was the first time I had to plan and shop and cook on my own. My friends and I prided ourselves on our frugality and self-reliance. To me, self-sufficiency meant being able to get everything you need on your own—knowing where to buy milk and how to get a job and who to call when your sink leaks through the ceiling.

To the organic farmers in Thailand, self-sufficiency meant human survival at the most basic level: relying on the food you grew yourself, making many of the things you needed, and eliminating the ties to the outside entities who would dictate how you carried out your livelihood. Self-sufficiency was a goal for every organic Thai farmer we talked to. One activist farmer had never sold his rice. Another bought only oil and cell phone minutes.

Most people depend on people thousands of miles away for the food they consume each day. I am dependent on the farmers who grew that rice, and all of the people who packaged and shipped and sold it. Most Thai farmers are also dependent. In 2008, an estimated 88% of Thai farming households had significant debt. In Roi-Et Province, we spoke with a group of farmers who were under contract to sell their crop to a large sugarcane and cassava company. Reducing the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers they bought from the company was their way of trying to escape the debt that forced them to sign contracts year after year. In another village, the company supplying villagers with chicks and buying back the grown chickens stopped providing them during the avian flu panic of 2004, depriving the villagers of their livelihood for two years.

Our mutual dependence in the face of agricultural globalization sunk in for me when, walking to my host parents’ farm in rural Northeast Thailand, I spotted a Cargill bag hanging over a bamboo fence. Cargill’s headquarters are 45 miles from my school in Minnesota.

Depending on an outside source, especially when it does not have your best interests at heart, can only expose you to problems. It can also allow you to knowingly or unknowingly ignore the realities of the things you are relying on because they are removed or far away. The Jasmine 105 I ate for four months was grown with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that depleted the soil and increased erosion rates. The chemicals polluted the water, and the degraded soil demanded more fertilizers, accelerating these processes. The people who planted and harvested my food likely have debt that is three times their annual income (if they are like 68% of farmers in Northeast Thailand) , and may have been sickened by overexposure to chemicals. Self-sufficiency, as one farmer here explained, demands awareness and respect for other people.

There are certain things we need to survive: food, water, shelter, energy. But of course, no one is self-sufficient. Even the hermit eating berries in a cave depends on the environment. That was something that these organic farmers understood absolutely. When the rains stopped too soon, “it’s like our hands and feet were cut off.” When the land was soaked in chemicals year after year, the worms disappeared and the land’s fertility ebbed away. We have to be dependent, and that fact can draw us closer to the earth and to each other.

But globalization and relationships between actors don’t have to, and shouldn’t, disturb self-sufficiency, at least in terms of our most basic needs. At each level, we should have a certain degree of self-sufficiency. Ideally, individuals would grow some of their food, repair their own appliances, or at least be able to function when the power went out. Communities, too, should have some self-sufficiency. They should be the source of their staple foods, depend on their own water, and provide their own health care workers, teachers and building materials. Finally, nations must grow food for their people to eat before they churn out exports and cash crops. This is why, as many have suggested, food should be excluded from free trade agreements. Food is more than a commodity. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognizes food as a fundamental human right (Article 11). If we “free” its trade, governments will be unable to protect not only their self-sufficiency, but their people’s livelihoods.

In Northeast Thailand, individual and community self-sufficiency through agriculture is growing. Three thousand farmers are members of the Alternative Agriculture Network, which works with farmers and the government to promote organic agriculture. In Yasothorn, the profitable Green Market has about 30 stands; in Surin, 80 families sell their organic food at a Green Market each week. One Yasothorn organic farmer explained, “We have rice to eat, freedom. We are director, manager, janitor. We eat everything we grow.”

Self-sufficiency is power. It is money under the mattress. It is food security and food sovereignty. We cannot and should not be isolated, but we must be responsible for the things we need to survive.

1 Hufford, Jonathan, et al. “Voices From the Margin: Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Northeast Thailand: Surin Organic Agriculture.” CIEE Thailand, Fall 2008.
2 Hufford, Jonathan, et al. “Voices From the Margin: Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Northeast Thailand: Surin Organic Agriculture.” CIEE Thailand, Fall 2008.
3 Kyotha, Bamrung. Exchange 9/22/09
4 Hufford, Jonathan, et al. “Voices From the Margin: Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Northeast Thailand: Surin Organic Agriculture.” CIEE Thailand, Fall 2008.
5 “Fair Trade Rice Backgrounder.” Engage.
6 Yasothorn organic farmers exchange, 9/20/2009
7 1966
8 Alternative Agriculture Network exchange, 9/19/2009
9 Personal observation and Yasothorn Green Market organizers exchange, 9/19/2009
10 Yasothorn organic farmers exchange, 9/20/2009

Liz Aeschilmann
Carleton College

Yasothorn Experience

Living with a family in Yasothorn, a small province in the lower Northeast, I began to understand the life of a Thai rice farmer. Each day rolled into the next, my family seamlessly performing each day’s work which began well before sunrise. My meh and paw (mother and father) rose at 5 o’clock, paw heading to the rice fields and meh washing the dishes from the previous day, feeding the animals and beginning the day’s food preparation. The children woke up a bit later, washed, ate and headed to school- one by bicycle and one driven on a motorcycle. As the morning progressed my meh and her sister (whom share the same house) washed clothes, prepared sticky rice and tended to the cows, pigs and buffalo. After sunset the whole family ate together,usually watching a Thai soap opera or other comparable show on their television which resided on the roofed deck located a few yards from the house. By 10 o’clock, everyone was showered and asleep under the network of mosquito nets hung every evening. Besides a chicken or two unsuccessfully attempting to swipe a few grains of rice during meals, the day ran without interruption. There were no arguments, tele-marketers or blinking call-waiting signals.

As an American raised in New York City and the surrounding suburbs, I have grown accustomed to a slightly different routine. Breakfast is generally rushed or eaten on the go, parents commute to their jobs and housework is regarded as an unfortunate chore. Work, I have observed, is an aspect of one’s life to be separated from the rest. One’s occupation is not necessarily “who you are.”

Living with my Thai family, however, I realized that they do not consider farming an occupation. Rather, it is a lifestyle. While the mere proximity of the cows and rice fields signifies that there is no physical separation between work and home, it was clear from every activity I watched my parents perform that this division simply does not exist. The contribution my paw makes by planting and harvesting rice is not more significant than other work that must be done. While meh may not plant in the field as frequently as the male family members, the concept of a “stay at home mom” does not exist. The whole family functions as one unit; when asked their profession, every family member answers “ben chow na,” I am a farmer.

Both the average American family and rice farmers in Thailand are dependent on some sort of livelihood, but it is the definition of livelihood that changes. While I grew up defining this term as one’s salary, monetary gain is not the goal of my Thai family. Rather, they farm to feed themselves. Any extra crops are sold to afford only the food and amenities they themselves cannot produce. The Thai government may consider the farmers in my village impoverished, but I now realize that falling on either side of a poverty line established by officials who do not understand one’s life is meaningless. Experiencing this lifestyle for only five days has made me question the power I assign to money and the materialistic values that seem almost innate as an American citizen. While, as Americans, we may convince ourselves that our career cannot define us, the fact remains that the majority of our waking hours are spent in offices or tracking billables (at least until we retire at the ripe old age of 65). While I do not plan to abandon my future career goals just yet and certainly understand the positives of capitalism, I think it would do us all some good to question our perception of money and the consequences of categorizing our lives into “work” and “personal.”

Katherine Cahn
Georgetown University

Food From The Heart

I’ve heard about local food, but this was a whole new scale. Our lunch, eaten in a picturesque bungalow in the middle of Petch Thongnoi’s sun-drenched rice paddy, all came from within a fifteen yard radius. Bananas, fresh fish, rice, beanpods, bamboo, sawalots, and papaya came from the backyard; several types of chili peppers, lemongrass, and onions from the front. A feast, a cornucopia, performance art: Petch killing and gutting the fish with one artful swing of a knife as we roasted them over the fire, on a stick, like marshmellows. Our hands were soon covered in sticky and spicy food, our arms intertwined as we unabashedly reached and delved into the communal dishes at the center of our seated circle. Petch punctuated the end of the meal as he rolled up the giant place-mat banana leaf, scooping up the food scraps, and tossed it directly into the rice paddy water. Everything from the rich Thai soil, and everything back to it!

In America, how often is lunch a spiritual, or even memorable, experience? Living with the Thongnoi family (Petch, Nusaan, and their granddaughter Agnoon) revealed how one can exist mindfully, lovingly, sustainably, and full of faith in even the simplest daily routines. Their life revolves around the communal consumption of food, and around the cultivation of an incredible variety of plants growing literally everywhere. My host parents’ ethos is simple: “If you grow plants with love, and harvest with happiness, the plants will grow well. This is why it is important to be happy in all things.” This mindfulness during gardening transcends the act of merely raising crops. True to their Buddhist beliefs in self-awareness and moral action, they live their faith daily, emanating an intangible but undeniable warmth and wisdom.

Almost all farmers in Thailand switched to chemical agriculture at some point as the seemingly unstoppable Green Revolution and its chemical fertilizers spread across the globe. Members of the current reactionary organic movement have seen the environmental and human costs of planting monocultures riddled with chemicals, providing artificially high yields of a single crop for export. They recognize that depleting the soil of its resources at escalating rates and that selling produce permeated with carcinogenics to a faceless, nameless consumer are all dishonest and immoral ways to share food. As the villagers of Yasothorn reiterated, to grow food organically, one must have the love and the heart to do it. Their concern for their family’s health follows the Buddhist belief that change begins with the individual.

In a country that is 95 percent Buddhist, what does the day-to-day faith of its average citizen look like? How does the a Thai layperson reconcile the goal of being committed to renouncing the material world (the Buddhist paradigm) while being firmly rooted in it? I think it looks a lot like the Thongnoi family. They grow everything they need, create that which they can’t grow (soap from bamboo!), consume nothing other than cell phone minutes, have no debt, are mindful of their bodies, and get great pleasure from providing good food to others. Nothing they do is radical, but may hold many answers to the problems plaguing contemporary Thai society. The pastoral life of organic farmers like them across the Isaan region provides a model of living their faith by growing food mindfully with love for themselves, the environment, and the consumer.

One old man shopping at the Yasothorn Organic Farmer’s Market told us that he heard about the fledgling organic movement from his local wat, or temple. On the wall was printed the Five Precepts (abstain from killing, false speech, sexual misconduct, stealing, and taking sense altering substances), and included, almost as a footnote, a simple encouragement to eat organically grown food.

This encounter made me wonder: could Buddhism provide an endorsement, on a larger scale, for organic agriculture? The embryonic organic movement needs demand and awareness on the consumer side, to encourage current chemical-farmers to join the ranks. While the temple may hold less sway now than it once did, it still certainly remains a significant player in society. For the endorsement to be compelling, it would likely need to be more visible than something as passive as the printed suggestion on a temple wall. What if monks established a ceremony specifically for organic farmers, recognizing their position in society as different from farmers using chemicals? While this might feel like elitism, don’t they deserve this recognition? Or if monks only accepted chemical-free food for alms – how would that impact farmers? Would it drive people away from the temple?

As my host mom Nusaan said - quite profoundly - “Food is the number one issue in the world.” What role can religion play in making food more mindful, fair, and just?

Jon Springfield
Davidson College